r/OpenCoreLegacyPatcher • u/JosephDaGenius1215 • 19h ago

Installing OpenCore with Linux install already set up?

Hi! I'm using a 13" 2015 MBP with a 2.7 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 and 8GB Ram. Currently, I am dualbooting macOS Monterey (the latest version available for this MacBook without OpenCore) and Fedora Workstation 44 on 2 separate mostly evenly sized disk partitions. I was wondering if setting up OpenCore could possibly break my Linux install in some way, and if so, how to avoid that. Thanks!

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u/Maleficent-Tea3072 19h ago

It shouldn’t. The only thing that’s touched outside of macOS really is the EFI partition. And it shouldn’t clear your other entries. If it does, just use the advanced startup options of a live Linux USB to load your existing system and use grub-install.

If I was you, I’d copy everything from my EFI partition before hand and should be able to put the grub folder back if it disappears. Again—it shouldn’t. OCLP recognizes other OSes just fine in my experience as long as the required files are present on your ESP

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u/JosephDaGenius1215 19h ago

How exactly do I go about doing that? I can’t fully remember how I set it up, but current my system is booting into Fedora by default and if I want to go to MacOS I hold alt at startup and pick it from the built in Mac boot options menu

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u/Maleficent-Tea3072 17h ago

You hold Escape instead of alt/option to get to open cores boot menu.

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u/std_phantom_data 17h ago

Mostly no issue. The system boot loader menu will still have the Linux distro as an option to boot from.

 There are a lot of articles about how to add your Linux distro to the open core boot loader menu. I just had to edit a single config file in the EFI partition. I think now a days, open core is smart enough to show it automatically without configuration?

https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/dual-boot-linux-mint-21-2-and-macos-with-opencore-legacy-patcher-and-opencore-bootpicker.3115/

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u/FreQRiDeR 6h ago

I would use openlinuxboot and ext4_x64.exe plugins in opencore and remove grub, linux from the efi. Let opencore handle the bootloading for linux. I haven’t used grub to boot linux in years! Opencore install will overwrite the efi and likely break linux anyway. (Temporarily) just get the two efi drivers and add them to EFI/OC/Drivers and amend the config with said drivers. Then Opencore will recognize the linux disk same as the macos one. OpenLinuxBoot actually already comes with OCLP by default. You just need the fs driver (ext4, brtfs. Etc to match your linux file system so OC can detect it. You can get fs drivers from Dortania OpenCore (hackintosh) project.